Category: Diversity

This may be the last thing that I write for longCan you hear me smiling when I sing this song?For you and only youAs I leave will you be someone to say good-bye?As I leave will you be someone to wipe your eye?My foot is out the door and you can’t stop me nowYou wanted the bestIt wasn’t meWill you give it back?Now I’ll take the leadWhen there’s no more room to make it growI’ll see you againYou’ll pretend you’re naiveIs this what you want?Is this what you need?How you end up? Let me knowAs I go remember all the simple things you knowMy mind is just a crutch and I still hopeThat you will miss me when I’m goneThis is the last songThe hearts start breaking as the year is goneThe dream’s beginning and the time rolls onIt seems so surreal And now I sing itSomehow I knew that it would be this waySomehow I knew that it would slowly fadeNow I am goneJust try and stop me nowYou wanted the bestIt wasn’t meWill you give it back?Now I’ll take the leadWhen there’s no more room to make it growI’ll see you againYou’ll pretend you’re naiveIs this what you want?Is this what you need?How you end up? Let me knowAs I go remember all the simple things you knowMy mind is just a crutch and I still hopeThat you will miss me when I’m goneThis is the last songWill you need me nowYou’ll find a way somehowYou wanted toI want it tooAs I go remember all the simple things you knowMy mind is just a crutch and I still hopeThat you will miss me when I’m goneThis is the last songAs I go remember all the simple things you knowMy mind is just a crutch and I still hopeThat you will miss me when I’m goneThis is the last song

I was fairly sure a couple of weeks ago that the market was putting in a bottom. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index told me so.
I was so confident that a bottom was forming that I even commissioned a graphic showing why. Now, I’m worried about how far much farther the market could fall. The S&P 500 tells me so.
Here’s why.
My confidence was built on how the S&P 500 behaved after dropping for no more than a minute on Oct. 10 to 839.80. That was the start of a wild day of trading.
The S&P approached 839.80 one more time on Oct. 10, and, between then and Nov. 12, the market tested that low four times, bouncing up each time.
Technical analysts call repeated bounces off a low level the establishment of a support level, which means that the mere act of approaching that level generates new buying. (There are, of course, millions of ways to identify a market bottom — which is to say, a market bottom shows up when it shows up. Check this set of criteria.)
I, for one, was hoping that support seemed to be forming between 840 and 850 on the S&P. If it kept holding at roughly those levels, then confidence would start to build among investors and, in time, confidence would beget buying. I wasn’t alone in watching the market trend after Oct. 10. Check this post on Seeking Alpha. USA Today noted the chatter as well.
I was under no illusions that the formation of a bottom meant stocks would take off again. If all went well, I thought the market would muddle along for, say, six to nine months. And, once the economy started to show real signs of recovery, then stocks might move slowly higher. That’s what happened after bear markets in 1973-74, 1981-82 and 1987. After the dot-com bust and the after-effect of the Sept. 2001 terror attacks, the bottom came in October 2002, followed by a major test in March 2003.
Alas, my hopes were shattered quickly.
On Nov. 13, the S&P dropped to 818.91, which was bad but not horrible.
On Wednesday, the support gave way. The S&P 500 closed at 806.58, just above its low on the day at 806.18.
Thursday, the market just seemed to fall apart. The S&P 500 fell to 752.44, which was below its closing and intraday lows in 2002, in the aftermath of the dot-com bust and the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. The index is now down 52% from its October 2007 peak — the largest percentage decline for the index since it fell 82.4% between March 1930 and June 1932.
Wednesday’s was so ugly a fall that Barry Ritholtz, who writes the Big Picture blog, suggested the S&P 500 could drop to, say, 681 before new support formed.
That level is basically where the trend line of the S&P since it peaked in October 2007 intersects with the long-term support line since 1984. That would translate into Dow Jones Industrial Average falling to 7,100 or lower.
“There are deeper levels, but it’s too ugly to write now,” he added.
Thursday, Ritholtz wrote simply “Ouch!”
These are scary times, really scary times.
What happened? Markets don’t operate independently of reality.
Here are the problems.
Bank stocks tanked. Here it looks like Treasury boss Hank Paulson created another problem. He said on Tuesday that the Treasury Department had decided that buying up bad assets from financial institutions was a bad idea — even though he’d gone to Congress and begged for $700 billion to do just that.
“The sense that policymakers are struggling to get ahead of the markets’ woes, and have frequently switched course or backtracked on earlier declarations about what needed to be done, has damaged investor confidence and created even more jitters in the markets,” Jane Sasseen wrote on BusinessWeek.com.
She’s being polite. So far this week, Citigroup has lost 51% of its value. JPMorgan Chase is down 32%.
The decision of Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to let Lehman Bros. fail in September dried up credit sources for everyone and everything: from General Motors to the young couple looking to take out a mortgage.
Tech stocks have slumped. Concerns have deepened in recent weeks as concerns deepened that business spending on technology will slump. Intel has fallen 8.2% this week; Microsoft is down 12.6%.
Oil and commodity prices are a problem. Slowly, the markets have realized that this will be no ordinary recession. So commodity prices — and related stocks — are crumbling. Crude oil fell below $50 for the first time since 2005 and is down 66% from its peaks in July.
Commercial real estate is becoming increasingly stressed. Real estate is throwing us another sucker punch. With retail chains like Linens ‘N Things going out of business and cuts coming from other retailers, retail real estate is sagging. General Growth Properties, the nation’s second-largest mall operator, is in such trouble that it has hired bankruptcy counsel. Just in case.
A ton of office space will come on the market in New York, Chicago, Seattle and elsewhere following the collapse of Washington Mutual, Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros. and huge layoffs coming from Citigroup and others.
So, when will a bottom show up?
I offer up Carter Worth’s list to watch. Worth is the chief market technician at Oppenheimer Asset Management. He and others at Oppenheimer were beginning to think after Oct. 10 that a bottom might well be forming. He has enough visibility that a number of people will pay attention to him.
He also wondered which stocks would signal if he was right — or wrong. He crunched some numbers and, on Nov. 10, came up with a list of 26 stocks that he believed could be used as a “control mechanism” to signal the market’s direction. The idea was that it takes a lot of buying pressure to move a stock to a new high and an equal amount of selling pressure to move a stock to a new low.
The group included Citigroup, Bank of America, Internet retailer Amazon.com, search giant Google, chip maker Intel, leather-good producer Coach, and railroad CSX.
Sadly, the list pretty quickly offered a pretty strong signal of what to expect. By Nov. 14, the group was down an average 11.9% from Nov. 7. By Thursday, the declines had widened to an average 29.8%. The best performer of the group, Polycom, was down 13.6%. The worst was Citigroup down nearly 60.2%. One blogger wrote Thursday that Worth’s call was “way to soon.“
The S&P 500 dropped 6.2% between Nov. 7 and Nov. 14 and finished on Thursday down 19.2% from Nov. 7.
Let’s hope the index can find a bottom soon. Or things, which are scary enough, could get really scary.

20 Fun Things You Can Do with Family on Thanksgiving
We all know some of the favorite things people like to do on Thanksgiving: watch football, watch The Macy’s Day Parade, and of course taking a nap after gorging on Turkey.Well the purpose of this article is to inspire everyone who reads it to turn off the TV (web, video games) for part of the day and really spend some quality time with your friends and family. You’ll have have fun doing it and you’ll create fun, fond memories.

1. Take a Walk. Pick an enjoyable destination. All you need to bring are your sneakers and conversation! Or you could join a Thanksgiving road race or road walk.

2. Play Touch Football. Or soccer, tag, hide-n-seek, etc. Just get outside with the gang and do something that involves running around and taking in some nice fresh air.

3. Boardgames! Get out those games you have in the closet since last Christmas and haven’t played yet. Scrabble, Life, Yahtzee, Cranium, Trivial Pursuit, Trouble, Chutes & Ladders, whatever! Have some silly fun!

4. Play Charades. This doesn’t take much. Make your own rules as you go. Have fun!

5. Sing-a-Long. Karaoke. Get out the instruments, guitars, piano. Dust off that accordion. Bring out the tambourines, spoons, etc. Put on a holiday radio station and sing along. Make up a contest. You can really have fun with this.

6. Memory Sharing. Share stories. You can pick a theme such as:
The greatest day of my life.
The best thing that happened in my life this year.
My favorite memory from childhood.
The funniest thing that ever happened to me.Have someone scribe the stories or videotape the event.

7. Share Thanks. At dinner have everyone share what they are thankful for before eating dinner.

8. Silly Dance Contest. Just like it says. Be silly. Dance. Make up your own rules.

9. Kids Talent Show. There’s usually one grownup at family gatherings who likes to get the kids doing activities. If you’re that person maybe you want to have the kids perform for the whole family after dinner. While everyone is watching football you could throw it together. (Of course adults can join the show too!)

10. I Love My Family because…. Gather round as a family and have each person share what they love about the family.

11. Share the Love. Have the family all in one room and have each person tell why they admire the person next to him/her. And then that person says why they admire the person next to him/her, and so on. “I Admire ___________ because…”

12. Treasure Hunt. Create a simple treasure map and “prizes.” There can be one prize or multiple prizes, like an egg-hunt. Ideas for prizes: chocolate turkeys (is there such a thing?) or a packet of coins or a gift certificate wrapped up in a box. Share your ideas in the comments please!

13. Name That Tune. Play the humming game where each teams or individuals have to name the tune.

14. The Questions Game. Here is a link to a family game with very few rules. You get to make up the rules. The idea is to spark conversations, have fun, and get to know each other better.

15. The Craziest Thing …. (that I saw or experienced this year). As a family tell stories that can be true or made up. It can be a little bit like “To Tell the Truth.” Everyone tells a crazy story that is either true or made up and everyone has to guess if it is true or not. And the story doesn’t have to be something that they actually experienced.

16. Our Family Tree. Have everyone imprint a fingerpaint handprint on a big sheet of paper with their name underneath. You can have it framed or take a picture of it to share with everyone.

17. Start a Thanksgiving Day Banner. Starting this year create a banner that can hang in your living room that will have a picture of the whole family from each year. It can become an heirloom for future generations. You could also create a similar item electronically say with a website.

18. Three Legged Races. Link up kids/grownups. You could also try a sack race or create an obstacle course race too. Have some fun silly prizes or simple privilege prizes like the first place team doesn’t have to help with clean up or they get first dibs on the turkey.

19. Family Thanksgiving Journal. Grab a blank notebook. It doesn’t have to be fancy. Write down everyone’s thanks for this year. And then next year do the same so that over time you build a treasured family book of thanks as well as a sort of family history.

20. Make Me Laugh. Tell jokes. You can make it into a game to see if you can get someone to laugh. Can be done as individuals, round-robin, or as teams.Happy Thanksgiving all! Enjoy!

(from dumblittleman.com)